Marvel Brave: A power-lacking boy aims to be the strongest in a world of heroes. - The Fool's Counterattack

The underground parking garage was deathly silent. Only the emergency lights on the walls flickered red, slowly. Every other light was dead. The air was cold, reeking of something raw. The smell of scorched metal and blood mixed together—the stench of a battlefield. Haruto laid Sakura down on the bare concrete. Her body was already terribly cold. Her usual half-up hairstyle had come undone, and her proud, silky black hair was now a matted mess of blood and dust. Her slender arms lay limp, utterly strengthless. Her sweatshirt had spread a horrifying reddish-black stain, centered on her left flank. "Sakura..." He called her name with a hoarse voice. No answer. With trembling hands, Haruto tore off his jumpsuit jacket, then pulled off the shirt he wore underneath. He bit into the edge of the shirt with his teeth and ripped it, making a long strip of cloth. He clenched his jaw so hard it felt like his teeth might crack. "Please... stop the bleeding..." He wrapped the torn cloth tightly around Sakura's side. A lukewarm, thick sensation seeped into his hands. His fingers were stained with her blood. Each time he wound the cloth, her small body twitched faintly. It hurt. That was proof she was alive. Still alive. He pulled the cloth tight, binding it. Another wrap, another. He moved his hands mindlessly. Sakura's skin was pale, the color drained from her lips. Her breathing was as faint as a mosquito's whine. "...ngh" A small moan escaped her lips. "Sakura!" Haruto pressed his hand to her cold forehead. Her bangs were plastered to her skin with dried blood. He gently combed them aside with his fingers. "Wait here. I'll definitely come back." His voice trembled with tears. He stood up. His knees were shaking. The strength was about to drain from the soles of his feet. But he couldn't fall. Haruto forced his trembling legs to move and broke into a run toward the stairs. With every step, his ruined lungs screamed. One step after another up the dark stairwell. The elevator was dead, the walls crumbling in places, exposed rebar floating up out of the darkness. Still, he didn't stop. (Like hell I'm giving up.) (I'm going to protect Sakura.) His anger at his own powerlessness was the only fuel driving his wounded body forward. The sixty-second floor. He practically body-slammed the door to the lab floor, "Workshop Beta," forcing it open. The air inside was cold and dead. No one was in the four-hundred-square-meter space. The worktables were littered with the wreckage of abandoned projects. Only the giant main monitor was still alive. On the screen, a vision of hell. Park Avenue in flames. A Chitauri Leviathan jutting out of a building. Blue beams indiscriminately shooting down civilians. People fleeing in panic, collapsing one after another. The sky was completely blanketed by countless enemy fighter craft. She was watching that scene. At the very back of the floor. A glass booth. In its corner, a small figure was huddled up. Lili. She was hugging her knees, her face buried in them, covering her ears. Her long platinum-blonde hair was spread out in a tangled mess, hiding her slender body. Trembling hands peeked out from the pockets of her lab coat. The space around her was quiet, as if cut off from the rest of the world. Haruto rushed to the glass wall and pounded on it with his fist. Thud, thud, thud! "Lili!!" She didn't react. Her hands pressed even harder against her ears. "Lili!! I know you can hear me!!" Haruto pressed his forehead against the glass and shouted. "It's me, Haruto! The useless piece of trash you called me! Please, look up!" His shout shattered the silence. Her trembling shoulders stopped dead. Slowly, she raised her face. The translucent, pale blue eyes peeking through the gaps in her bangs were terribly wet. They weren't the usual cold, unapproachable, icy eyes. They were the eyes of a child who had given up on everything. "...You." Her voice was so faint it barely seemed of this world. She stood up with unsteady steps and opened the glass door. Her lab coat was crumpled, one shoe missing. Dried tear tracks remained on her cheeks. She stared blankly at Haruto's blood-soaked upper body. "...Why are you here?" "I have a favor to ask." Haruto put his hands on his knees, gasping for breath. "Sakura... the most important person to me... she's hurt. There's no time. The only way to save her is to stop those things." He pointed at the monitor. On the screen, the swarm of Chitauri still covered the sky. "I need you to lend me your wisdom." "...My wisdom?" Lili slowly shook her head. "It's impossible... I can't. You saw, didn't you? Even Tony Stark lost to that false god. No matter what someone like me does..." "You're going to do it." Haruto took her cold hands in his blood-soaked ones. Lili's body flinched. "I'm not a hero, or a spy. Like you said, I'm just trash. But that's exactly why I can think of something. There's a way to fight without fighting." "...What?" Lili looked up at Haruto with tear-filled eyes. Haruto looked at the monitor. He looked at the gigantic mothership on the screen. "We send a fake command to that big bastard. Something like, 'Identify your own fleet as the enemy.'" Lili's tear-wet eyes widened slightly. "...What do you mean?" "Those things move based on signals from the mothership. The fighter craft I saw on the street were all moving the same way. Like they were being controlled by someone. If that's the case, we hijack that signal and feed them a bogus command. Friendly fire, self-destruct, whatever. We don't need to fight. We don't even need to hack them. We just need to send them the wrong orders." "That's... that's just a pipe dream." Lili's voice was shaking. "Even if it's theoretically possible, it's not realistic. First of all, we don't know what kind of encryption the Chitauri command signals use, or the modulation method, or anything. We need raw signal data to analyze. And not just any data—clean data, with zero noise contamination!" "Then I'll go get it." Haruto looked her straight in the eye. Lili's expression froze. "...Are you insane?" "How close is 'point-blank range' from here?" "Th-that's... at minimum, within a few hundred meters of the mothership's signal transmission source... in other words, right in the middle of that swarm." "Got it." Haruto squeezed her hands even tighter. "Please, Lili. You can do this. I know it. You're smarter than Tony Stark. That first time we met, you pulled up all my data in five seconds. In front of Pepper Potts, I couldn't do anything. But I still managed to worm my way into an internship. This isn't about theory. It's not about logic. If you say it's 'impossible,' then I'll just ignore that 'impossible' like I always do." "...You really are an idiot." It was impossible to tell if Lili's voice was crying or laughing. She shook off Haruto's hands. And then she ran back to her booth. Lili's fingers began to dance over the virtual keyboard projected in the air. Her speed had already surpassed human limits. Her blue eyes, in stark contrast to moments before, began to emit a cold, ruthless light. "Here's the plan. As you said, the Chitauri's swarm behavior is driven by command signals from the mothership. If we sample the raw signal and reverse-calculate its modulation pattern, we can generate a fake command signal. However, this is just conjecture, but they likely share a 'friend-or-foe identification code.' If we can make them misidentify that, we can induce friendly fire." Her voice was no longer trembling. It was rational and fast, like a precision machine. "The problem, as you pointed out, is that we need to collect the raw signal at point-blank range. And also—" Lili picked up Haruto's portable communicator from the worktable and pried open the back cover. "I need to modify this communicator. I'll install a data collection program. I'll give you... three minutes. I'll make your lifeline in that time. While I do, you figure out how you're going to get that signal." "...Are you sure?" When Haruto asked, Lili picked up a tool from the spread on the worktable and stopped her hand for just a moment. Without looking at him, she gave a tiny, tiny nod. "...For the first time in my life, I'm crying for someone else. I don't understand it. I can't calculate this feeling. But you... you broke my reason. Take responsibility, you idiot." Her voice trembled again, just at the end. A single tear slid down her pale cheek and fell onto the keyboard. Still, her fingers didn't stop. Lili soldered one tiny mechanical part after another, as if playing a piano. Her small back looked enormous to Haruto. A few minutes later, Lili roughly strapped the modified communicator onto Haruto's wrist. Several small antennas were haphazardly attached to the armband. "Listen. For data collection, I need a stable connection for thirty seconds. If the connection drops within those thirty seconds, it's all for nothing. The Chitauri aren't going to protect you. A minute from now, you might be dead." "I know." Haruto stared at the communicator. "And... take care of Sakura. She's in the underground parking garage. Behind the pillar at the very back." "...Yeah." "If something happens to me—" "Just go!!" Lili shouted for the first time. "Make sure you succeed! Don't you dare make my first-ever gamble worthless!!" Haruto turned his back to her. "Thank you, Lili." Leaving only those words behind, he burst out of the crumbling lab. He ran down the corridor. He sprinted down the stairs. The countdown timer Lili had set on his wrist communicator showed it was almost at zero. He didn't even have time to go back to the first floor anymore. He rushed to a window on the sixty-second floor and looked outside. Below him, Park Avenue was burning. The sky was still black, covered by the Chitauri swarm. (Am I really going to jump from here into the heart of that swarm?) His fingertips trembled with fear. But he had already made his decision. "...Sakura." He whispered her name quietly, steeling his resolve. He kicked the window out with all his strength. The glass shattered, and the hot wind of the flames blew into the lab. Through the booth's monitor, Lili was watching. She wiped her tears and poised her fingers over the keyboard. This was her battle. Haruto planted his foot on the rubble and leaned out into the burning city.

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Episode 6

Name: Marvel Brave: A power-lacking boy aims to be the strongest in a world of heroes.
Author: Novelia

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